The French Experience

​France is a country that I haven’t spent much time in thus far in my career, so I was glad the town of Chaux-Neuve had a good amount of snow to properly experience the area! Living up to expectations there was an endless amount of delicious French cheese and fresh baguettes almost everywhere you go. In fact when we showed up at the venue the first day each team received a block of local cheese as a gift. On our first day in France we skied on awesome new trails for me, I mentioned this in my last post but it was such an awesome ski I had to bring it up again. We followed that up with a training session on the jump hill that was quite fun. We had excellent conditions and I had a fun time jumping a hill we don’t spend much time on. 

Warming up for jumping with Taylor and our Czech friend Tomas

​The competitions in Chaux-Neuve are well known for the amount of spectators that show up to the events and how excited they are. It is somewhat surprising because when you show up as the town itself seems to be off by itself, not that close to anything other than super small farming towns. But as soon as the weekend rolls around it seems like every family (especially the kids) from the surrounding region come out to watch, and they cheer loud, no matter what. The announcer gets so hyped up during the competition sometimes you think he is introducing a basketball team at the NCAA Championship game, then a French athlete goes and man does it get exciting. At times he literally makes me want to cheer out loud for whoever is next up. During the races there are fans lining the majority of the course especially the hills, and they cheer super loud, by name. It surprised me the first time actually, some random group of people were cheering for me by name all the way up a brutal hill, and they don’t care whether you are in 45thplace or 1stplace. As you may be able to tell, the atmosphere last weekend was super fun! I also was able to make another step forward in my personal performance, while it may not have showed at the end of the day on the result sheet I made progress I was happy with. Below are some photos from the competition weekend! 

​I am now back in Slovenia for a few days after a long drive from France. I spent a few days training and recovering here before the next competitions in Norway this weekend. We are staying in apartments these couple days so it is very nice to be able to cook for ourselves and have a quality place to spend time. Slovenia got a little bit more snow from the last time I was here which makes for much prettier mountains. As always, stay tuned for more!

Skiing in Slovenia